Broken MARC database format

The current table layout does not properly handle MARC
fields that are both repeatable and have multiple
subfields. There's no way to differentiate the
subfields that go with different fields. The fix is to
create a new table, biblio_subfields, like this:

Field data is still required for storing those few MARC
fields that don't have subfields.

As I really need this fixed in order to import my
client's data, I will probably implement the changes
very soon. I'm posting a bug so that the developers
know about it and can correct me (soon) if I'm
operating from any wrong perceptions.

Micah

=== Comment by mstetson on 2004-04-30 ===

Even the changes I describe above don't make things perfect.
We also need a position indicator to keep track of the
order of subfields within a field. This bug needs fixing
badly, but it won't happend in 0.5.0, and I'm not certain
about 0.6.0. The changes required are extensive, and we're
placing security fixes at a higher priority.

Anonymous: the "Deprecated ..." warning is not related to issue 1. It will go away when PHP is run with production settings, but using EasyPHP-5.3.7.0 you will run into more issues.

For example: install and upgrade for OpenBiblio versions up to 0.7.0 can't run succesfully because of a backwards incompatible change in MySQL 5.5. Until this is fixed, try an older version of EasyPHP. Probably EasyPHP 5.2.10 will work.

That MARC is not stored perfectly in the database tables, does not seem to be a big issue for current users of the OpenBiblio 0.x.x branch. But it is a know limitation, so for release 0.7.1, a section "Known limitations" has been added to install_instructions.html